Technical Nuggets

Over the years we have been in the software business we have benefited from the efforts of many dedicated software developers.

This page attempts to “pay forward” by documenting work we have done to enhance software which has had issues, so that it works correctly for us.  Where downloads are provided, they are done so on an “as is” basis, and we cannot answer questions about them.  Where the original source is known it will be provided.  All copyrights remain with their original owners.

We will also document other nuggets of  technical information that we feel may be helpful to the programming community at large.

• Qode Bridge Theme and Yoast Interference
  Qode Bridge Theme and Yoast Interference
• Why we use CentOS for our web servers
  All of our production servers run a distribution of Linux called CentOS, and specifically the latest release, CentOS 7. This is a very popular and well-supported distribution whose focus is on stability and security. This is one of the reasons why we like it so much. The philosophy of CentOS is that you use modern technology ...
• Fix for VMWare vSphere (ESXi) Snapshot Creation Failure with “msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCING-ERROR” message
  Fix for VMWare vSphere (ESXi) Snapshot Creation Failure with "msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCING-ERROR" message
• MSCONFIG stopped me from being able to log in
  The MSCONFIG Program In Windows there is a very useful program called MSCONFIG.  It can be run from the “Run” entry box in the “Start” menu.  It allows you to selectively decide what programs and services will be run the next time the PC is booted.  This can be very useful when trying to diagnose a ...
• Samba and Windows 10
  Accessing Windows 10 Shares from Linux Systems I was recently setting up a workgroup network consisting of both Windows and Linux machines.  Specifically they were Windows 10 and Linux Mint implementations. Although I did everything recommended on the numerous websites I could not get the Windows machines to show up on the network, or get the 2 ...
• Using Windows 10 Administrative Shares
  I Can’t Access The Admin Shares! Windows provides a number of pre-configured administrative shares to allow administrators to perform functions like system backup.  These include ones like C$ and ADMIN$.  However, in a workgroup environment Microsoft has made these unavailable without any obvious way to change that. The Solution Like so many of these types of issues, the ...
• AH01797: client denied by server configuration
  If you have recently converted from Apache 2.2 to 2.4 you may notice messages in the error log like this: AH01797: client denied by server configuration: /var/www /html/domains/ www.somedomain.com/favicon.ico but they seem benign. When the domain is protected by a password, or access is only allowed ...
• Possible PHP-FPM Security Issue
  A Note for PHP-FPM Users If you are using PHP-FPM to process your PHP files in Apache, you may have a security risk. A common way to access the PHP-FPM service is by using mod_rewrite to direct files (with the appropriate extension) to it.  This works well until you decide to protect folders on your server with ...
• Staff Directory Plug-in Hack For Ordering
  If you are using this Staff Directory plug-in Version 1.0.2 you know that there is no way to control the order of the entries.  We have modified the file called classes\staff_directory_shortcode.php to add this feature.  You can download the file in a ZIP file from here. I added to the shortcode to define a “meta_key” field. Eg: ...
• Changing Web Browser Support for Secure Sites
  Due to changes in the encryption and credit card industries over the past year, older web browsers are being left behind in supporting the latest security requirements. For those of you who happen to be still be on Microsoft Windows XP or Vista and are using Internet Explorer, this means that your access to the secure ...
• Google Chrome 45 Table Positioning Bug
  In Google Chrome 45, a bug was introduced that caused issues with column positioning and width assessment in table columns. This impacted one of our customers and broke their site very badly by incorrectly positioning their right sidebar. It also caused a width calculation by the browser to result in -10 when using the Chrome ...
• IMAP or POP3?
  Have you ever been confused about IMAP and POP3 when setting up your device to access your email account? With careful setup you can access all your email from all your devices; avoid going over-quota at the mail server; and have a single location where all your incoming emails are archived. We have added a page ...
• WooCommerce and Authorize.net hint
  When using the WooCommerce Authorize.net AIM module, don’t forget that the configuration needs a different API ID and Transaction Key when in Test Mode from that when in Production Mode. This is because the module accesses the Authorize.net sandbox when in Test Mode, and this is an entirely different  server from that used in production. When either ...
• Heavy, Unexplained iSCSI and NFS traffic on VMWare ESXi after ESXi Upgrade/Patch
  We recently upgraded and patched one of our VMWare ESXi 4.1 implementations. After doing so, we found that the server performance was terrible. Not only were virtual machines running poorly on it, we found gaps in the performance graphs in the vSphere Client and long waits trying to get any information about the server from ...
• PHPFox Template Functions
  If you are a developer using this Social Networking Package you’ll already know that the documentation is pretty thin.  It uses PHPFox template functions similar to Smarty, but not identical.  We have been unable to find any documentation on the functions available.  However, we have stumbled on the PHP file in the source code that ...
• Poppassd and CentOS 6
  Introduction We use poppassd to implement a feature that allows our email customers to change their account password. It is a service that runs on the system that hosts the account, using xinetd. The Poppassd/CentOS 6 Problem We recently discovered that the version we were using no longer worked on CentOS 6. It has been working on CentOS ...